The Fabulous Clipjoint

{Photo by Gareth Kay. Used under a Creative Commons License.}

From Fredric Brown's The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947)

We walked north two blocks on the east side of Michigan Boulevard to the Allerton Hotel. We went in, and there was a special elevator. We rode up a long time, I don't know how many floors, but the Allerton is a tall building.

The top floor was a very swanky cocktail bar. The windows were open and it was cool there. Up as high as that , the breeze was a cool breeze and not something out of a blast furnace.

We took a table by a window on the south side, looking out toward the Loop. It was beautiful in the bright sunshine. The tall, narrow buildings were like fingers reaching toward the sky. It was like something out of a science-fiction story. You couldn't quite believe it, even looking at it.

"Ain't it something, kid?"

"Beautiful as hell," I said. "But it's a clipjoint."

He grinned. The little laughing wrinkles were back in the corners of his eyes.

He said, "It's fabulous clipjoint, kid. The craziest things can happen in it, and not all of them are bad."

Though the Allerton Hotel is still here and in operation, the Tip-Top-Tap is long gone, all that's left of it the false promise of the beckoning sign. It seems cruel for our skyline to offer the warm glow of that sign, a will-o-the-wisp that disappears when you enter the elevator, find no button for the Tap, and realize that the swank luxury you'd imagined is but a chimera.

Which gives me an idea: maybe the Sun-Times, in an act of manifold civic duty, should buy and refit the Tip-Top-Tap, send out free drink coupons to all manner of elected officials, and resurrect the glory days of the Mirage? For after all, the one thing we can be sure of is that our fair city remains but a fabulous clipjoint.

My kind of town . . . for murder!

From The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947), by Fredric Brown

Things like that must happen a dozen times a day in Chicago, I thought. They don't rate ink unless it's a big-shot gangster or somebody important. A drunk rolled in an alley, and the guy who slugged him was muggled up and hit too hard or didn't care how hard the hit.

It didn't rate ink. No gang angle. No love nest.

The morgue gets them by the hundred. Not all murders, of course. Bums who go to sleep on a bench in Bughouse Square and don't wake up. Guys who take ten-cent beds or two-bit partitioned rooms in flophouses and in the morning somebody shakes them to wake them up, and the guy's stiff, and the clerk quickly goes through his pockets to see if he's got two bits or four bits or a dollar left, and then he phones for the city to come and get him out. That's Chicago.

And there's the jig found carved with a shiv in an areaway on South Halsted Street and the girl who took laudanum in a cheap hotel room. And the printer who had too much to drink and had probably been followed out of the tavern because there'd been green in his wallet and yesterday was payday.

If they put things like that in the paper, people would get a bad impression of Chicago, but that wasn't the reason they didn't put them in. They left them out because there were too many of them.

It's a good thing I have to no time this weekend to do anything but stay inside and proofread! (Aside, that is, from a quick break tomorrow morning to visit the lakefront--on which trip, however, I'll be running, and therefore safe from the Criminal Element, most of whom, surveys reveal, are smokers, and thus unable to catch the fleet of foot.)